Cryptocurrency Highlights Of The Week

Bitcoin Cash has successfully “forked” from Bitcoin, and a new fork named Bcash has just been announced. Here are the cryptocurrency highlights of week 31:

Bitcoin officially forked and split in two on Tuesday. The new spin-off from the Bitcoin blockchain is called Bitcoin Cash, and it was developed as a measure to increase the capacity of Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain. Because Bitcoin’s original blockchain could only have one megabyte (MB) of data added to it every 10 minutes, transactions have come to be more expensive and processed at slower rates. Bitcoin Cash blocks can be as large as 8MB.

After the successful fork of Bitcoin Cash another new possible Bitcoin fork popped up. The new cryptocurrency would be named Bcash, and it will “use the existing Bitcoin ledger combined with Zcash privacy technology. It aims to alleviate the congestion in the Bitcoin network while protecting users with the strong privacy guarantees of Zcash technology”. The new currency is “expected to launch in the first quarter of 2018”.

The Chinese government listed blockchain in its “Thirteenth Five-Year” National Informatization Plan from 2015, and since that time the nation has been working diligently toward incorporate the technology into daily life. The tech’s inclusion in the plan signals the importance China has attached to it, and this was just confirmed by the government’s announcement that it “will utilize blockchain technology for social taxation and electronic invoice issuance matters.” Furthermore, we should also see implementation at the city level in China, as several local and provincial governments have recently promulgated pro-blockchain policies. In fact, a smart cities initiative has already enticed a Chinese automaker to integrate the tech into its business model.

Digital currency exchange Bitfinex has revealed that it will be launching a new trading platform for Ethereum-based tokens. Dubbed Ethfinex, the service aims to function as a decentralized exchange for tokens under the ERC20 standard. Bitfinex, founded in 2012, is one of the world’s largest bitcoin exchanges by volume, encompassing more than 20 percent of exchange-based trading volume in the past week, according to data from Bitcoinity.

Compared to the previous week the price of Bitcoin has increased by around 18 percent, with the exchange rate currently at about $3,244 per BTC. The price of Ethereum increased by more than 25 percent over the same period, taking Ether up to a rate of $250 per ETH. Ethereum Classic gained about twelve percent, with the price increasing to $15.64 per ETC. Zcash gained 16 percent. One ZEC is now trading at roughly $208 per coin.